July 03, 2008

Aquamacs 1.4 and style modes

My editor of choice for software development is Aquamacs. It's a Mac OS X version of Emacs that retains all the flexibility and power of Emacs but is a native Mac application that supports standard OS X shortcuts, look and feel.

The most recent version adds some nice new features, including the ability to open multiple files in tabs (similar to Safari or Firefox). However, one of the Emacs features which I rely on appears to have been changed. When I open a file, I expect a certain context highlighting style, depending on the type of file. Now, I am not an Emacs expert, but years ago I had defined the styles I liked and put them in my .emacs config file. When first switching to Aquamacs, I ended up dropping some of that info and using some of the many built in themes.

However, with this new release (1.4) it seems to ignore that information entirely, and opens files up in some default style. I am not clear why this behavior was changed. I had to dig around the Aquamacs site a bit to find the solution, and I thought I'd post it here, so it might help someone else.

The solution was to add an Aquamacs-specific line to the bottom of my .emacs:

(setq aquamacs-styles-mode t)

This made Aquamacs once again honor the style information I had set.

Comments

Thanks for the handy tip! The maven tips are particularly ufeusl.For what it's worth, SLIME has gotten a lot easier these days thanks to leiningen. To check it out, install the leiningen swank-clojure plugin: lein plugin install swank-clojure 1.3.4(1.3.4 is the latest version as of this writing, but users should use whatever the latest version is on clojars.org)From there, you can open a project file and execute the following emacs command with the point in the project file: M-x clojure-jack-inThis will start a REPL in which code will be evaluated (println statements will be evaluated in that buffer, for example). It's a really easy way to get a SLIME session started without a lot of fuss. All of the usual SLIME commands apply (M-TAB for completion, C-x C-e for evaluation, C-M-x for compile-top-level). A set of some of the most ufeusl SLIME commands are on the github page for swank-clojure.Cheers!